Category Archives: Meta

It’s been almost exactly a year since my last post here. Quite a bit has happened, and clearly much of that ended up keeping me off the blog. Besides being busy, there was a very serious health issue to contend with. But I get ahead of myself…

I hope there’s still a few of you die hards out there waiting for me to come back. I know that I get email from folks occasionally asking how I am, and for those I’m grateful. I’ve tried to answer when I could, but sometimes they would slip through the cracks…

Last year at about this time I took a break from posting to head back across the state to pick up my bee hives that hadn’t made the move with us. Alas, they were all dead but one hive, and I left that hive for the farmer who had so graciously hosted my bees. His neighbor is a beekeeper so they’re in good hands.

Upon my return life got even busier. We had to fence in 40 acres of pasture, with cross fences, which took quite a bit of time. We bought cows and ran those on the pasture. The cows showed up before the pasture was ready, so we were literally fencing in new pastures the day before we had to move cows onto it. Crazy…

I picked up replacement bee hives, placing half of them at our new land and half of them at the place we’re renting. They were going gang busters all summer, and the harvest time was looking good.

As you may recall, our overall plan was to rent the home we’re in now while we build a home on our land, then move there full time. Our land is about 20 minutes or so from where we’re renting. So throughout the summer, while I was putting away money to start construction, my wife and I refined the house plans. Over and over and over and over again.

Finally, we ended up with plans that would work, and got cracking. The excavation guy came out and dug us a giant hole to put the house in. We dug a smaller but deeper hole under where the kitchen was going so my wife would have a nice root cellar right under the kitchen.

The week before we were scheduled to pour our foundation, I went in to the doctor with some pain and had some tests run. The diagnosis came back with something I didn’t expect at all.

Cancer.

They didn’t know for SURE, but they were about as sure as doctors could be. The first treatment was to get surgery done to remove the tumor. Once the surgery was done, my entire family and I, were on pins and needles waiting for the pathology reports to come back.

A few days later, in a doctors room with my wife, the doctor and nurse came in with the news we were dreading. It was cancer, and there was evidence that it may have spread beyond the primary tumor. Given that news, we put a hold on our building plans, and focused on the health issues.

Long story short, I went to see a specialist in Seattle, and we decided to wait for a bit before jumping into chemotherapy. The prognosis was the same, and there was a 30% chance or so that I wouldn’t need to have chemo. So I decided to wait a month.

Two and a half weeks later I was back at the clinic for a persistent cough. X-rays showed that I had strange masses in my lungs that weren’t there last month. Turns out I had multiple golf ball sized tumors in my lungs with lots of smaller ones. Plans changed in a hurry

I spent about a month and a half in the hospital, 7-8 days at a time, for inpatient chemotherapy. The week before Thanksgiving we got the news that we were hoping for. My tumor markers were clear and my MRIs showed that my cancer was gone. I was officially in remission. I had one more round of chemo to go and then I was done.

My Thanksgiving was spent in the hospital, but I knew that it was my last round of chemo, so that made it a bit easier. It was still pretty rough. At least it was a brief respite from hospital food….

I’m now in remission, and getting blood work done regularly. I have periodic MRIs to verify my remission.

We’re moving full speed ahead this year with our plans, though things have changed there a bit too. I’ll write about that in another post though because this has gotten really long.

It’s good to be writing again. I’ll try not to let it go quite so long between posts this time….

You may have noticed a nice new theme going on here at the website today. There will be quirks over the next few days as I monkey around with stuff and find glitches with the theme change. These things are, frankly, completely inevitable. Grant over at Headway Themes has been a reader for a while… Continue Reading

I mentioned last week that it looked like the plague was enroute. And it was. And I was the lucky first victim, who spent two days straight in bed, and just got out of bed today. It sucked. And now our youngest has it, and our oldest sounds like she might be coming down with… Continue Reading

Just a quick note to tell you not to expect much here beyond news roundups until the 2nd. I may post a brief blurb or two if the mood strikes, but other than that, I’m taking it easy for the holidays. You might have already noticed, but hey, better late notice than no notice…

Sorry about the lack of a post yesterday. There was a regional Internet outage up here in NE Washington, and I wasn’t able to get connectivity back until noonish. Unfortunately between work backlog, and some other obligations there won’t be a post today either. Back to the regular schedule tomorrow, but in the mean time,… Continue Reading